I watched this on BBC a few days ago. The Story and history of Detroit in a full 1hr and 15 min documentary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIgC5whSP8E

Just an intro I'm afraid. The full documentary is available here;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rkm3y/Requiem_for_Detroit/
or
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rkm3y

http://www.4rfv.co.uk/industrynews.asp?id=102970



Well worth a watch and the documentary does actually have an optimistic ending, depending on your point of view of course.

I spent most of 2009 in Detroit (suburb) on a project. Great people. It was sad to listen to the local news though. Also, I never had to wait to get a table at a restaurant and traffic was not bad at all.

Hopefully they can diversify and rejuvenate the economy.

Buckeye

Sounds interesting. Does the documentary talk about Mayor Bing's plan to actually downsize and transform large swathes of the city into farmland? It seems almost unthinkable to actually shrink a major American city, but it's going to be necessary unless these Rust Belt cities can actually find a totally new niche to draw people back to the city.

The bottom line is that the city needs to contract to the size it really is, and that means a lot of vacant properties need to be razed and planted with grass and made into parks or something more useful (maybe farmland) than empty rotting buildings.

I read a story about the farmland side of this that explored the money trail. It explains a lot about why such an uneconomical plan is even being considered.

Back in the 1970s, when the Bronx was really bad, I always said "If I was an adult (I was in my late teens then), I'd BUY some of the totally abandoned blocks" - the buildings were already down - they were empty lots. Plant trees and wait - now some of the neighborhoods aren't so bad - can you imagine having a house on 2-3 acres in NYC?

Just to clarify ... we're not talking about suburban Detroit here ... we're talking about the city of Detroit here.

I lived in the suburbs for a while and liked them very much. They are currently hit by the same unemployment that so many other areas are hit by, but that much worse because of the prevalence of the automotive industry there - or what is left of it.

I can't look at the links in the first post because my business filters them out, but from what I understand, the short story of Detroit is:

1. 1967 riot in Detroit. 43 dead, 467 injured, 7200 arrests, 2000 buildings burned down
2. Companies moved out.
3. Many folks of European heritage moved out.
4. Some folks of African heritage who had enough money moved out too.
5. Along with 2, 3, & 4 went most of the jobs and tax money.

End of story

BTW, there is NO intent to slander or belittle any race or heritage here. AT ALL!

That process, the hollowing out of the cities as those who could move to the suburbs, had started a decade earlier. Highways, cars, and cheap gasoline, along with the single family home on an acre of land as an ideal, made the suburbs possible. The state made home loans cheap, built highways, promoted development and paid for infrastructure like roads, sewers, power lines that supported the vast tracts of single-family homes.

The cities were starved for resources and physically, economically and socially deteriorated. Unemployment, crime, hopelessness and despair were the inevitable outcome. Inner city landlords were burning their properties for the insurance money and to avoid the cost of upkeep.

The riots didn't cause the flight from the city. They may have accelerated the process but the riots themselves were largely a result of unemployment and poor living conditions caused by the hollowing out of the city.

Detroit was one of the first cities to see this trend. It was highly dependent on a few large industries. Was historically a place for poor people from the south to move to. Consolidation of the auto industry and a high proportion of people directly or indirectly dependent on a few large industries made the city more vulnerable to the failure of the tax base.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAjLIVISqRw
Gordon Lightfoot, Black Day in July.

The downsizing of the auto industry was a big thing but I don't think it was the main problem. I don't think it was about race either.
I saw a lot of cities lose their core. It has got to where I always expect to see slums in the shadows of the office towers.

To put a survival slant on it I will say that living in a good community gives you a better chance, that is if you must live in a city.
Jane Jacob's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961) explores what makes for good safe communities inside cities.

I see the same happening in my city now. You have the overcrowded, many year waitlist for parking downtown so the companies are finding it cheaper to build outside the city outerbelt. So I now live in a suburb home close enough to walk to work. The city staryed denying low income housing permit renewals in the areas right around downtown so those buildings would go vacent and get sold and be redeveloped but then all the lower income housing moved furthur out and forced people like me to leave. Nothing directly against low income, but it seem the majority of poeple in those housing are there because they don't want to work rather than those that really can't and need the program. So we got all the drug users/dealers living within our neighborhood living off our tax dollars and 'supplementing' their income in various illegal ways. It took us a few years to get debt paid down and get our house sold so in that time everything I owned got its own bob, everything was packed into something making it easy to move preparng to bug out to the suburbs.